Java Persistence with Hibernate

For me a more apt title would have been: "ORM with Hibernate and EJB3".

This book conveys loads of excellent information.

There is a great Domain Model "Caveat Emptor" that is used as backdrop for the bulk of the book based upon an auction system to convey the intricacies of the technologies.

* Part 1 (about 150 pages) is more example orientated and shows how to use Ant tasks to turn Java entities annotated with meta-data or in association with XML to DDL/SQL and vice-versa.
* The next 540 pages (Part 2 & first section of Part 3) make up the bulk of the book. This part is more of a reference. This material is very informative, but a bit of a slog,
heavy going and dry at times. Quite taxing on the old brain!
The format generally the following pattern:
-> The Hibernate way of doing things. Sometimes with XML. Sometimes with annotations.
-> The EJB3 way.
-> How Hibernate can compliment EJB3 and sometimes vice-versa.
-> A summation highlighting two technologies.
* The last two chapters of Part 3 (next 200 pages) are awesome and what make the book really shine.
They return to a more easy to understand example driven format and tie everything together.
The penultimate chapter has a good discussion on architectural concerns. (Unfortunately you ought to plough through the detailed reference section to best understand everything).
There is also an interesting introduction to TestNG.
* The last chapter goes on to demonstrate Seam. As a framework it overcomes some of the pitfalls of JSF. It has definately sparked my interest in learning more about Seam
and rekindled my interest in JSF.
* On a final note. It's also a great SQL reference to boot.
Great job Christian and Gavin!

Too much. (2/3 people found this helpful)

I've recently been reading Java Persistence with Hibernate, having had limited experience with Hibernate previously. My thinking was that a book this size should provide a really gentle but complete coverage.

After 5 months, I had got as far as Chapter 7. Normally, I fly through books, but there was something about this one that just didn't work for me. I don't like 'giving up', but by chapter 7 I asked myself honestly a) was I enjoying it and b) was I learning, and I came to 'no' for both.

The book (as we know) was written by the authors of Hibernate, and to this end they know it inside out. However, this is also their weakness. Instead of giving me what I needed - an overview, followed by some good examples that I could follow and learn from, they would show me one way to do something in Hibernate, then in annotations, then with JPA xml, then with JPA annotations except for the bits that couldn't be reached and so had to use Hibernate annotations. Then they would give me a reason/situation when this approach couldn't be used, and the process would start over with a new technique. As a reference, this is excellent. As a learning book, it's a nightmare, so much so that I've stopped reading.

The definitive hibernate reference (2/2 people found this helpful)

If you are going to buy a book about how to use Hibernate, this is the one to get.

It has in depth coverage of native Hibernate, JPA (just because JPA is a standard doesn't make it evil) and the Hibernate implementation of JPA. It also covers the issues surrounding object/relational mapping and various "architectural" options for using persistent objects in an application.

It's a big book - it needs to be, it covers a lot of ground and contains a lot of detail. I'd go for the PDF version, it weighs less and you can use the PDF reader to search the text.

Could have been so much better (12/15 people found this helpful)

I have found Hibernate In Action to be an indispensible guide when developing Hibernate persistence solutions, so I was eagerly awaiting the release of its successor.

Most developers will want to use standard JPA as much as possible for portability reasons, and only use Hibernate where absolutely necessary to use features not supported by JPA.
However this book fails to cleanly separate discussion of JPA from Hibernate, meaning that if you take this approach to using JPA you end up wading through large sections of the 800+ pages of this weighty tome.

I have to agree with Ganeshji and C. Updike - this lack of any clean separation of JPA and Hibernate makes it difficult to get useful information out of the book.

This is a shame, as the writing is of a high standard - unfortunately the content is very poorly organised.

Good book, but... (11/14 people found this helpful)

I read this book after reading Hibernate in Action, I found almost 70% of it repeated. So im not sure wether this book is value for money for me anyway. But if your starting out in hibernate I would probably say buy this, However if you already have Hibernate in Action, its not worth the extra cost and most of the information can be found on the net after some hunting.

Christian Bauer, Gavin King

Reader Reviews:

Awesome book. Deceptive title. (0/0 people found this helpful)

Too much. (2/3 people found this helpful)

The definitive hibernate reference (2/2 people found this helpful)

Could have been so much better (12/15 people found this helpful)

Good book, but... (11/14 people found this helpful)

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